Classic Goosebumps - Welcome to Dead House: Welcome to Dead House

Summary

Classic Goosebumps!11-year-old Josh and 12-year-old Amanda just moved into the oldest and weirdest house on the block--the two siblings think it might even be haunted! But of course, their parents don't believe them. You'll get used to it, they say. Go out and make some new friends.But the creepy kids are not like anyone Josh and Amanda have ever met before. And when they take a shortcut through the cemetery one night, Josh and Amanda learn why.It's our thirteenth fan-favorite companion to R.L. Stine's blockbuster Goosebumps HorrorLand series. Now with all-new bonus features including an author interview, bizarre trivia, grotesque activities, and more!

Reviews

#1 "It will just kill you."The old house that Amanda and Josh just moved into with their parents is not haunted... Or is it? Things get crazy in this ghostly tale of the ominous haunted house.As the first book in the series of the Goosebumps franchise, while not my favorite, I'd have to say it's still one of the great ones.

I already read this book and almost all the collection of Goosebumps many years ago. I am glad I found them again and start to read them . These are nice easy readings for teenagers that are interested in horror. The books are well written the story is simple and effective. Is a nice easy reading that does not required a lot of time to be read if you are an adult and you can still enjoy the stories.

Josh and Amanda's family inherits a house from their father's great uncle Charles. The house is located in Dark Falls, a small town four hours away. Josh and Amanda don't want to leave the only home they've ever known and don't want to be four hours away from their friends. When they arrive at their new house, they notice it seems cold, dark and creepy. Their little dog Petey doesn't seem to like anybody in town and for good reason. The kids start to see people in their house, but they're not sure if they're real or if it's just their overactive imaginations.

It's a quick read that you can finish in an hour or two, but I found it entertaining. The sentence structure was repetitive at times making it a little too formulaic even for a children's story. It has likable characters, but the story is predictable. It's not too scary for a child if that's a concern.

I probably shouldn't be reviewing a YA book as an adult, but here goes. I liked the idea of the plot, although I did pick what was going on pretty early on. I think the story would have worked better as a full length book as the characters were fairly nondescript and needed developing.

Now that I'm writing this review months later than having read it, I can proclaim that Welcome to Dead House has survived the test of time(not all of it though, just a fragment). I liked the first installment of Goosebumps. The story had to be strong to allow for such a prolific sequelitis. The ending is very well written, particularly when one of the zombie girls looks at us sadly before dying. Better than expected.

This, the first installment of the popular 90s children's series "Goosebumps", is possibly one of the stronger entries in the collection. Somehow Stine manages to straddle the border between age-appropriate horror and some truly chilling scenes and ideas. Though the series as a whole often manages to fall too easily on cliche and fake-out suspense, I can see how this story might have inspired a sense of confidence in the writer's ability to successfully pen a long running anthology.Welcome to Dead House follows the story of Amanda and Josh, a sister and brother pair who are forced to move to a new house in a strange new town when their family receives word that they've inherited property from a great-uncle that they didn't even realize they'd had. A large chunk of the beginning of this book actually deals a lot with the siblings' frustration and sadness about moving and it would have been very easy to put the book down at this point, but it's really toward the middle that the suspense and intrigue picks up.While Amanda and Josh try to make the best of their unusual new living situation, things just don't seem to go very well from the beginning. They hate the house -- it's old and creepy and much bigger than they're used to, so it's not surprising when Amanda starts to think she sees people in the hallway or in the windows. The kids in town are a little weird and Amanda isn't quite so sure that she trusts them, either. To make things worse, their dog keeps running away and it's during a late night search for him in the graveyard that the siblings really start to discover that there's something very weird about their new town.One of the things I found most intriguing about this story is the monsters. They are presented as a strange mix of zombie, vampire, and ghost and the only thing I can think to classify them as is a blood-drinking ghoul. Though these monsters don't really entirely fit the bill of the traditional demon of Arabian folklore, I think it might serve as the closest comparison, which I think was actually a very interesting decision for Stine to make. All in all, for the Goosebumps series on its own, I would rank this as top-notch, which I've chosen to reflect in my rating. For juvenile horror it is still quite strong, but for juvenile fiction as a whole it is middle-grade. I would recommend it for middle-to-older-aged elementary school children and anyone with an interest in what the whole Goosebumps craze was about in the 90s or adults that are simply interested in how horror and supernatural creatures are presented to juvenile readers.

The first book in his hugely-successful "Goosebumps" series, R. L. Stine writes about a boy and girl and their horrifying adventures after they are uprooted from their home and taken to a new town. Combining the perfect amount of suspense and creepiness, "Welcome to Dead House," despite being a fast-paced, easy read, is probably best-suited to more mature readers and upper elementary school students. The chapters are short and the book flows nicely, so it is a nice transition to chapter books for readers who may not be familiar with longer books.

This book is about two kids Amanda and Josh and how they moved to this old, house. They dislike the house and everything around it. They grass and trees were dead and there was know life except crows. The was worse on the inside, the noises and the cob webs. The kids want to move out. The only nice thing so far was the sells men. He was nice and very helpful. They soon got a little used to things until they start seeing kid everywere in the house. Dead kids. The scary thing was they looked like there group of kids they met. They thought it was inposible until they saw all there friends names on tomb stones in the cemetary, and even worse they need there blood. The head of it all was the nice sells man. He tricked the family, and now wanted there blood. Then they found out the ghosts can only live when there is no sun. So the kids tricked to ghosts and burned them all. All on there way out of the house, they saw a car pull up, a family stepped out and looked at the house. As they drove of, Amanda thought she the evil sells man, but she knew it was impasible, or was it. I liked this book because all the events leding up the end. The trick at the end was also pretty good. I realy got me thinking if the sells man was realy alive.

Reader beware, you're in for a scare. I loved Goosebumps when I was a little kid, and I have decided to re-read them. I read this in a few hours and I can't believe it has taken me this long to do so.This one didn't scare me but it did give me the creeps. I guess that's what I get for reading it in the middle of the night, while I was home alone.The plot is amazing, and the characters are great. I loved it just as much as I did when I was a kid and I can't wait to read the next book.

In this book a family inherits an old home from an annonymous family member in a creepy town. The family's two children Josh and Amanda know there is somthing strange about the townspeople but their parents wont listen to them until its too late.I realy enjoyed this book. It took me back to my elementary school days. Whenever I had the opprtunity to choose my own book I reached for an R.L. Stine book.In a classroom this story would not be apart of my curriculum but I would like to have it available to my students in the classroom. R>L> Stine books are fun and will be enjoyable to children and hopefuly help them build reading skills while they have fun.

This is actually the first goosebumps book I ever read! And boy was I caught off guard when I started.The plot, the characters, and the twists really amazed me the most!Truly a book worth reading!(I'll never forget how scared I was when I finished! I honesty believed the book was real!)

Amazon lists the age range for this series at 4-8, but I cannot imagine a 4-6 year old who would really be able to enjoy this on their own...or would really want this read to them, this stories are more involved and require a slightly higher level of sophistication on the part of the reader. I'm thinking the best age range for this book (and probably the series) is 8-14, with the 10-12 age range being ideal. This is our first encounter with the Goosebumps series (my daughter is 8) and I'll probably hold off for another year (ish) before I hand these over to read. I understand that Welcome to Dead House is one of the better (and more creepy) books in the series, and while I think it's a fine kick off for a series of horror stories aimed at 3rd-6th graders, this is a little much for my child this year. She's reading her way through the Mostly Ghostly series, which is slightly simpler in presentation while still maintaining the same horror flavor that Stein seems to be famous for. This particular volume, we meet Amanda and Josh (and their parents of course) who have just inherited a big old house in Dark Falls (love the town name), from an Uncle they didn't know they had. Dark Falls is a town that where no one ever seems to be out and about in the day and where there always seems to be lingering shadows. Right from the start Amanda notices things that seem off about the house and the town, but no one else seems to notice. Slowly over the summer, they make friends with the local kids...or so they believe. As the summer draws near Amanda and Josh learn something quite gruesome about the other residents of Dark Falls and just how they came to live in the dead house! This is quite creepy and does contain a few genuine thrills and chills, I found myself wanting to keep turning pages, hooked on finding out what happened next (and I'm 35). It's not as well written as some other horror I've read, but Steins style is certainly not the worst either. I think Welcome to Dead house is a promising start to this series and I'm looking forward to reading through it! Next year, when the Girl's reading level increases, we'll definitely be adding this series to her list!

This is the first book in the series, so I'll begin by talking about the Goosebumps series as a whole. Early on, Goosebumps was a pretty good series- not all the books were excellent, but there were some with good plots and interesting ideas (Welcome to Dead House being one of them). As the series progresses, however, the ideas get more weird and silly than just scary. Rather than gain depth, it gets shallower as R. L. Stine puts out about one Goosebumps a month in addition to writing Fear Street and various other works at a furious pace. Every book we meet up with the same pairing of two kids, a boy and a girl. Our narrator is always freaked out but trying to act cool, the main character is always dumb about telling their parents about weird phenomena (which generally goes especially poorly because the characters tend to be jokers), and, overall, many of the main characters simply aren't likeable. Goosebumps does not have the depth that many other ghost stories achieve either in the stories or in the character backgrounds, so it really needed to not get into plot ideas that were just silly, as in many of the later books. I read Goosebumps 1-50, so those will all be appearing here as I reread them.Welcome to Dead House is definitely one of the better stories. A family "inherits" a house from their great uncle and moves in. The house is large, but seems to be haunted and the town is kind of... dead. The kids get together with the other kids every day, but the kids disappear every time it gets sunny. A trip to the cemetery reveals the problem- all the kids are dead! Everyone in town, it seems, is a member of the living dead, and they need one family a year to feed on. The kids escape them, and expose the whole town to sunlight by knocking over a tree, killing all the undead and freeing their parents. The clincher is when the daughter tells the people moving into her house, "I used to live in your house."

RL Stine is one of the must read author while you are growing up. Focusing on horror genre, this book is the start of it all. I wasn't really interested in jumping on the RL Stine's wagon at first but after reading this, I changed my mind. Moving away from the home you've have been living in since you've been born is pretty hard. Worse, when you'd realized the house you're moving to looked creepy and mysterious, in the town that would make you feel like you're the only one alive there. Amanda was the one of the first, who noticed something else was not right in their new home, next to Petey, their family dog, who noticed things, actually people in this case, were not as normal as they seem. Next to hearing voices and giggles in her own room and experiencing apparitional appearances, Amanda and her brother Josh, managed to make some friends, but they were a bit queer with the way they keep looking at them. In the town itself, there's a cementary that would answer all the questions that came up since they've moved there.

I never thought that at age 30 I’d be writing a review for an adult reread of a Goosebumps book, but here I am.

What surprised me the most about Welcome to Dead House this go round was that this story is actually pretty scary, for a kid as well as an adult. Sure, it is written in a simple English a child could understand, but the creep factor is there and it resonates.

Guess what time it is, guys? Time for a walk down memory lane. It’s October so naturally I’ve been immersing myself in all things scary and one night I was reminiscing about where my love of horror began and I started thinking about revisiting Goosebumps. Well, it happened. First off, do you realize the first Goosebumps came out in 1992?I love the idea of re-reading my childhood favorites, but what happens if its horrible? Your entire childhood becomes a lie, that’s what. But I had to take a chance, even though I took a chance on Stine last Ominous October and it didn’t exactly pay off so instead of reading his newer stuff I decided to go back to the very beginning. And you know what? It wasn’t bad at all.“It’s really dead around here, huh?”He chuckled. “Yeah. I guess you could say that.”Welcome to Dead House is the very first in the original Goosebumps series (I don’t care what Amazon says trying to list this as #13 and Night of the Living Dummy as #1). It has all the makings of what scared me the most as a child and what still manages to freak me out still to this day: ghosts and things that go bump in the night. Josh and Amanda have just moved to a new town after their father received an old house from the will of a great-Uncle he never even knew existed. It’s a dark, creepy, and cold house but it’s huge and is a fantastic opportunity for their family. The kids aren’t sold. Amanda is constantly seeing things but keeps convincing herself that her mind is playing tricks on her. Her curtains move as if caught in a breeze even with the window closed and she hears footsteps in the hallway at night. But all of that is just her imagination running wild, right?I can’t recall how long it took me to read these when I was a kid, but I ended up finishing this in a single night. It’s more of a novella for the mature reader, but it was certainly fun. While it didn’t exactly give me goosebumps because I’ve certainly read far scarier at this point in my life, it still managed to put a smile on my face taking that walk down memory lane and seeing once again what I loved so much about these when I was a kid.

Two preteen siblings are put into mortal danger when their parents fail to realize that their inheritance of a house from an unknown uncle in an ominously-named town sounds eerily like a contrived premise for a children’s horror novel.Amanda and Josh move with their parents into a home they have inherited from their great uncle that none of them ever knew. When they arrive in Dark Falls, the kids find their house to be creepy and the town a bit odd. The town was always deserted when the sun was out, their good-natured dog growled at any townsfolk it met, and it seemed as if everyone in the town had previously lived in their house. Not long after Amanda and Josh befriend the local children, they learn in the cemetery that their new friends have been hiding something terrible. Josh and Amanda must find and rescue their parents if they want to leave Dark Falls alive.This novel set the standard, or perhaps template is a better word, for other R.L. Stine Goosebumps books to follow: one male and one female protagonist move to a strange location, they make new friends, and discover their new friends are actually dead (e. g. Goosebumps #10: Ghost Beach). Nevertheless, the story should be sufficiently gripping for a young reader who does not mind a predictable plot. This book is a decent introduction to the genre for children interested in the paranormal.